UpNext / New York City or Charlotte (Hybrid or Remote)
Learn more
Visit our website at https://upnext.team
ROLE MISSION
As a Software Engineer at UpNext, you'll help build and ship the transfer portal intelligence platform used by college coaches nationwide to track transfer portal activity, build recruit lists, and evaluate roster needs. UpNext surfaces the signals that drive college athletics across every conference, every cycle, from portal activity and recruiting movement to agent representation and market trends. You'll write code every day, take features from idea to release, and grow quickly with hands-on guidance from UpNext's founder and engineering leadership. This is an early engineering hire with real ownership, and you'll help shape how UpNext's product is built as it scales.
CORE RESPONSIBILITIES
ENGINEERING & PRODUCT DELIVERY
- Build across the full stack, using AI coding agents to move faster and ship well-tested code regularly
- Ship features across core platform surfaces: Search, Smart Lists, Insights, Team Pages, Athlete Profiles, and the Activity Feed
- Turn direction, prototypes, and coach feedback from the founder into scoped, polished, working software
- Support UpNext's core data pipeline (NCAA transfer portal data, JUCO data, AI-resolved transfer destinations, and emerging high school data sources) and help keep the data accurate and complete
- Help build and improve LLM-powered features and automated workflows
COLLABORATION & LEARNING
- Work side by side with the founder and engineering leadership on planning, technical decisions, and code review, and bring your own ideas to the table
- Learn the existing architecture, integrations, and data flows well enough to build confidently on a live codebase
- Turn feedback from coaches and recruiting staff into improvements that make the product more useful
QUALITY & OPERATIONS
- Participate in UpNext's weekly release cycle, including code review and QA before changes reach coaches
- Fix bugs, add tests, and keep code and documentation clear so the team can move faster and safer
- Help improve testing, observability, and deployment where they make development faster and safer
GROWTH PATH - FIRST 3 MONTHS
MONTH 1: FOUNDATION
- Learn the architecture, integrations, data flows, and technical risks of the existing codebase
- Get to know the UpNext platform: Search, Smart Lists, Insights, Team Pages, Athlete Profiles, and Activity Feed
- Learn the recruiting and transfer portal domain, including how portal data flows into the product
- Ship your first improvements to production
MONTH 2: GROWING OWNERSHIP
- Take on feature work with increasing independence
- Contribute to technical decisions and code reviews
- Begin joining the weekly product and leadership discussion
- Help with release and QA tasks
MONTH 3: INDEPENDENCE
- Own features from scoping through release
- Work directly with the founder on priorities and tradeoffs
- Identify and propose improvements to the product, data pipeline, and engineering workflow
ADDITIONAL OPPORTUNITIES
- Grow your technical depth across a data-heavy, AI-enabled product
- Take on more ownership as UpNext and the engineering team scale
- Deepen your expertise in the college sports recruiting and transfer portal space
QUALIFICATIONS
- Approximately 2–4 years of experience building and shipping production software, with ownership of features from implementation through release
- Strong full-stack engineering skills, including experience with APIs, integrations, and asynchronous workflows
- Familiarity with TypeScript, Next.js/React, and Postgres (Supabase)
- Demonstrated ability to learn, extend, and improve an existing production codebase
- Hands-on experience using AI coding agents to accelerate development; experience shipping LLM-enabled features is a plus
- Exposure to ETL or data pipelines is a plus
- Solid computer-science fundamentals, whether developed through formal study or practical experience
- Clear written and verbal…